Elon Musk-controlled satellite internet provider Starlink has told Brazil’s telecom regulator Anatel it will not comply with a court order to block social media platform X in the country until its local accounts are unfrozen.
Anatel confirmed the information to Reuters on Monday after its head Carlos Baigorri told Globo TV it had received a note from Starlink, which has more than 200,000 customers in Brazil, and passed it onto Brazil’s top court.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes last week ordered all telecom providers in the country to shut down X, which is also owned by billionaire Musk, for lacking a legal representative in Brazil.
The move also led to the freezing of Starlink’s bank accounts in Brazil. Starlink is a unit of Musk-led rocket company SpaceX. The billionaire responded to the account block by calling Moraes a “dictator.”
When do you need faster ocean communication, besides luxury? Nobody is owned fast internet on an environment-destroying luxury cruiseship.
Because cruise ships are the only thing not on the mainland. Certainly no cargo ships, research vessels, island nations, or anything else.
Ships should suffice with a 100 kB/s connection which already existed before Starlink. You don’t usually need to send tons of data.
Additionally, Starlink is currently only offered to a single island nation without submarine fibre-optic cable, the Easter Islands. Although they may get submarine fibre somewhere after 2026 anyways because that is when a new cable will be laid closeby.
Those speeds would be under ideal conditions, like sitting on land on a clear day with no weather.
It’s not about the raw speed honestly, but the machine latency and stability of the signal. Traditional GEO satellites need a pretty steady platform to maintain connection. The mobile capable dishes are usually less capable than fixed position ones because they need to be less directional to maintain a signal while moving. But in say rougher seas, the movement will be vastly different than a boat just sitting on a lake.
Starlink can compensate for this better because it’s designed to utilize multiple lower satellites simultaneously in view and a more omni-directional dish, alongside a signal that only needs to go to LEO. The difference between LEO and GEO or its is absolutely massive. The Starlink satellite constellation operates between 1/30 and 1/105 the distance of traditional GEO satellites. This means a latency of 25-35ms since they are so much lower. Lower latency will mean lower packet loss from instability which means higher throughout.
For a real world use case, look at the SpaceX landing ships. They originally used traditional GEO satellites for those video streams, and the motion and vibration from the rocket getting near caused total signal loss. Often signal loss for a white a while after the lending was over because the ship was still moving too much. After they switched to Starlink, I think I can remember maybe twice at the beginning where the signal cut for a second or so, and once they had a few launches to provide more consistent coverage and satellite redundancy, I can’t even remember the last time we lost a signal during a landing.
Real time video streams are essentially the worst use case for traditional satellite communication, and the differences between the network types of night and day.